With the development of cameras in mobile devices, the capacity of a personal album in a mobile device is rapidly growing. Typically, a thumbnail will be generated for a stored image in the personal album, and be put in a preview mode for a user to preview and review. A conventional method for generating a thumbnail of an image is directly intercepting a middle part of the image, and scaling the intercepted middle part to obtain the thumbnail of the image.
However, the conventional method takes spatial position information of the image into account, and does not consider content information of the image, which may cause the generated thumbnail not to express the content information about the original image. For example, when a position of a figure is not in a middle part of an image, if only the middle part of the image is intercepted, the generated thumbnail may only include a part of the figure, which reduces accuracy of expressing the content information of the original image.